What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and Understanding?

I was just reading the superlative new book by Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class, which I highly recommend. The second chapter, "Permanent War", focuses on the corrosive effects of the war in Afghanistan. In his long career, Hedges has reported on numerous conflicts around the globe. He previously discussed the indescribable brutality of war - and the disturbing fascination it holds - in his book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, but reading this new chapter brought it all back home for me again, not least because he describes an environment in which one of my family members is currently serving.

Here are the key passages:

We currently spend some $4 billion a month on Afghanistan. But we are unable to pay for whiteboards and markers for instructors. Afghan soldiers lack winter jackets. Kabul is still in ruins. Unemployment is estimated at about forty percent. And Afghanistan is one of the most food-insecure countries on the planet.

What are we doing? Where is this money going?

Look to the civilian contractors. These contractors dominate the lucrative jobs in Afghanistan. The American military, along with the A[fghan] N[ational] A[rmy], is considered a poor relation. And war, after all, is primarily a business.

[...]

"What good are a quarter-million well-trained Afghan troops to a nation slipping into famine?" the officer asked. "What purpose does a strong military serve with a corrupt and inept government in place? What hope do we have for peace if the best jobs for the Afghans involve working for the military? What is the point of getting rid of the Taliban if it means killing civilians with airstrikes and supporting a government of misogynist warlords and criminals?

"We as Americans do not help the Afghans by sending in more troops, by increasing military spending, by adding chaos to disorder," he said. "What little help we do provide is not useful in the short term and is clearly unsustainable in the face of our own economic crisis. In the end, no one benefits from this war, not America, not Afghans. Only the CEOs and executive officers of war-profiteering corporations find satisfactory returns on their investments."

That great American truth-teller, Major General Smedley Butler, famously described his long and illustrious military career in the following terms: "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." War is a racket. As Hedges illustrates, for those who rake in obscene amounts of cash from it, the war in Afghanistan is an end in itself.

Let's try a little thought experiment. What would happen if the war were to end tomorrow? While such an unlikely scenario would be a supremely moral decision and a general boon for humanity (despite the tremendous costs in human life, we would at least stop the bloodletting), for the corporations that profit the most from America's imperial wars -the Blackwaters (now Xe), the KPRs, the Halliburtons - it would be an unmitigated disaster. These companies depend on endless war and attendant government subsidies to fatten their bottom lines. As befits an amoral institution seeking one thing and one thing only - profit - the corporation is immune to all details of real human suffering.

The media and entertainment industries continue to present a sanitized, mythical-heroic vision of war that has nothing in common with war itself. I made the mistake of reading the letters section of the National Post today and saw the usual bromides about how Canada is liberating the women of Afghanistan and helping spread democracy. Hedges reminds us that no one could repeat those thought-terminating propaganda lines if they were standing over the shrapnel-filled bodies of slain Afghan children while devastated parents helplessly scream and cry. The next time you want to justify this criminal enterprise by spouting off ridiculous clichés about "finishing the job" and "fighting terror", look at the picture below and tell me that it's worth it:

One of the central themes of Death of the Liberal Class is how the expansion of the corporate state was facilitated and exacerbated by traditional liberal institutions which utterly failed to defend the ideals they claimed to uphold. The media, the church, universities, liberal politicians, artists and labour unions were all bought off with corporate money and in doing so lost any legitimacy they had previously claimed as the moral conscience of the nation. A series of anticommunist purges decimated the American intelligentsia and left an intellectual vacuum that has rendered certain ideas - such as class struggle - effectively unthinkable in mainstream discourse. Liberal thinkers such as Michael Ignatieff became apologists for the warmongers and torturers under the veneer of "humanitarian intervention".

The demise of the liberal class as a progressive force may have begun with its steady abandonment of the class consciousness which had inspired 1930s radicals and its replacement by identity politics, which - far from uniting oppressed social groups - actually divided them by race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. The shedding of Marxist theory proved disastrous over ensuing decades, as the long postwar economic boom ground to a halt and political leaders responded with a more nakedly aggressive capitalism. Deregulation, the resort to expanded credit and financialization of the economy coincided with industry's cannibalization of the workforce through union-busting, wage cuts and outsourcing. Liberals, having abandoned the language of class struggle in favour of anticommunist orthodoxy, utterly failed to resist.

It's tempting to dismiss the 60s counterculture as a mere trend, a fashion made by and for privileged baby boomers. The 1930s radicals struggled against the capitalist state without shame of addressing their oppressor by its true name. In the incomparably more desperate conditions of the Great Depression, socialists and communists had worked with union organizers to combat the brutal laissez-faire philosophy of the day and agitate for improved working conditions, which laid the basis for the modern social welfare state. The children of the 60s, by contrast, lived in relative material comfort. The 1970s witnessed a steady backlash against the countercultural ethos which culminated in the conservatism of the 1980s - the embrace of business values, jingoistic patriotism and conservative cultural denominators like religion and "family values". Sadly, that cultural backlash has lasted to the present day, embodied by ever-present greed, increased religiosity and the veneration of militarism. As much as I adore South Park, its episode "Die Hippie Die" summarizes the fashionable mockery of 60s idealism.

But whatever the faults of the countercultural generation, and the irritating fetishization of that period in boomer-targeted films, it has to be said that the basic values they advocated were miles ahead of what passes for youth rebellion today (if it exists at all). Say what you will about naivete; the younger generation in the 1960s spearheaded a widespread, vigorous, and determined antiwar movement. The degree of passion and organizational verve deployed against the war in Vietnam is something that we need to examine in detail today, when we have twice as many imperial wars of aggression but a fraction of the opposition. While resistance to the war in Vietnam may have been based on essentially self-interested motives - specifically, a military draft that rendered many of these radical youths eligible for combat duty - antiwar groups nevertheless expressed their opposition on a scale almost unimaginable today.

What is so funny about peace, love and understanding? The prevailing values of the 60s are widely mocked today, but the hippies had their hearts in the right place. Radicals of the 1930s and 1960s, whatever the difference in material conditions, had one thing in common: a faith in the ability of humanity to overcome its problems and create a better world. Of course, there was something of a difference in the tactics of the hippies and the more politically-active "yippies": where the former advocated dropping out of mainstream society in favour of a counterculture dominated by sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, the latter urged real political confrontation with the powers-that-be. My personal bias would be in favour of a union of those two approaches, because as much as I aspire to create real political change...sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll are three of my favourite things.

The point is that, whether you thought them naive or not, 60s youth fought for their ideals and values. In the decades since, we've seen an increasing youthful nihilism which may have started as soon as Charles Manson and the Rolling Stones' infamous Altamont festival revealed the dark underbelly of the Woodstock generation. Race riots reversed some of the goodwill generated in the white majority by Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Act, while elites capitalized on the proliferation of inner-city crime to blame "lazy" welfare recipients. It's no wonder the 1980s witnessed a conservative backlash.

But the increasing outspokenness of the "Silent Majority" was paralleled by a decrease in youthful activism. Generation X, decisively embodied by the 90s grunge phenomenon, became identified with a generalized apathy supplanted with heavy doses of irony. Mark Ames summarized that disdain for earnestness in his account of the recent Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally, which may have been the best account yet of the ideological vacuum among today's youth. Denied any concrete ideological alternative to rampant corporatism, the young embrace an "above-it-all" ironic distance that effectively cedes the debate to those who give a damn, no matter how far those individuals are comparatively removed from reality. Hence the Tea Party.

The American ruling class has been able to get away with as much as it has because it knows it faces no real mass opposition. This explains why Barack Obama has been able to break almost every one of his campaign promises, except for those - such as escalating the war in Afghanistan - enthusiastically backed by the elites. While Obama is, like most U.S. politicians, a self-serving charlatan and corporate whore, he had one thing right when he said real change comes from the bottom up. The notion that "Change" could come from electing a single politician from either of the two Big Business parties was always a ludicrous notion, but I have high hopes that the American Left is finally waking from their slumber and realizing the enormity of the task before them. Still the world's only superpower, the working class of the United States has a special role to play in the global class struggle.

In solidarity with our American class brothers and sisters, the Canadian proletariat has a duty to challenge the dominance of business interests over the levers of government. But only a vibrant youth component can provide the necessary energy to light a fire under the working class movement. We need to take the best qualities of the 1930s and 1960s radicals and unite them in a 21st century movement that will fight the corporate rape of this planet and its people. As my resident revolutionary cadre, Fightback attempts to influence the existing system by pushing for the adoption of socialist values by the NDP, but we should have no illusions as to the capacity of an establishment political party to fight for the values we hold dear. We will oppose imperialism in Afghanistan, G20-mandated austerity policies, environmental degradation, privatization of public services, and all manifestations of the class war conducted by the wealthy against the working class. And we will do it with or without the NDP.

Paradoxically, lasting peace is impossible without a fight. Since the G20, the ruling elite has made clear it will not tolerate opposition to its class warfare without resorting to outright repression. While we aim to mobilize the working class on the basis of a coherent socialist philosophy that exerted such an influence on the struggles of the 1930s (as Lenin said, "without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement"), we should take all possible lessons from the 1960s counterculture, which imprinted itself on the mainstream in no small part due to its cultural significance. A union of artists and political activists can only help the movement, since the greatest art generally has a didactic quality to it.

We must overcome the fragmentation of the population wrought by the proliferation of musical subgenres and dissipation of mass culture facilitated by cable/satellite television and the rise of the internet. Such a task can only be accomplished by focusing (per the advice of James P. Cannon) on the key issues that unite us. According to recent polls, 60 per cent of Canadians oppose the mission in Afghanistan while a bare 37 per cent support it. To put it another way, a clear majority of the population sides with the antiwar perspective, a fact easily forgotten in the face of a media apparatus that deems criticism of the war in Afghanistan a fringe viewpoint. In the face of such evidence - and the utterly antidemocratic decision of Harper's Conservatives and the Liberals to extend the mission to 2014 without a word of parliamentary debate - progressive forces should capitalize on widespread antiwar sentiment as the battering ram of a broader assault on the "values" and priorities of the corporate state.

The war in Afghanistan was not even brought up in the American 2010 midterm elections because the Republican and Democratic parties are equally in thrall to the military-industrial complex. We see the Canadian parallel in the agreement of the Liberals and Conservatives to extend the war for three years without any debate in Parliament. You want to support the troops? Work for what the troops actually want: a ticket home. End the war in Afghanistan.

UPDATE: As of today, NATO's war in Afghanistan has officially lasted longer than the Soviet one. Will the other Cold War superpower likewise meet its demise in the graveyard of empires?

More War! If They Want It

Can't really say it any better than this guy here. "Our" government has just decided on three more years of war and it isn't even debated in Parliament, supposedly the people's central deliberative council. A more direct refutation of bourgeois democracy I can't imagine. I wouldn't expect anything less from Stephen Harper or Michael Ignatieff, but Bob Rae's disgusting display makes me even more bewildered as to how he ever became leader of the NDP. Rae's entire political career has been little more than a warning to future generations of idealists.

A very close relative of mine is currently deployed in Afghanistan for a one-year mission. The idea that the war would be ending in 2011, near the end of his deployment, had helped blunt more blatant antiwar sentiment on my part. But the sneaky, deceitful way this war has been extended without any deliberation by the people's main legislative body (a farce to think of it that way, I know, but I'm just humouring popular Canadian mythology here) is a devastating indictment of any claim we might have to be a "democracy". I might level a lot of criticism at the NDP leadership, but in this case Jack Layton is absolutely right. While I would prefer that he advance the possibility of total withdrawal immediately, the fact that arguing for this to be debated in Parliament comes across as a radical "protest" point of view is a damning critique of our entire political system.

When the majority of a nation's people do not support a war, and that nation's government continues to prosecute that war against the will of the population, you cannot credibly claim to be a democracy. "Democracy" = "rule of the people". Good one.

This World is Going to Hell...How to Stop It

That hoary old cliché, “the world is going to hell in a handbasket”, seems truer every day. Wake up this morning and you can read about the ongoing worst environmental disaster in human history, a gushing torrent of crude oil destroying not only one of the world’s most diverse wildlife preserves, but the economy and way of life for millions of Gulf state residents. You can read about Sergeant James Patrick Macneil, 28, the latest Canadian soldier to die in our pointless imperial war in Afghanistan. Closer to home, we see that the federal government is getting its money’s worth out of the $1 billion it squandered on security for the G20 summit in Toronto. Pepper spray, LRAD sonic weaponry, plastic bullets, and now, we get word that they will indeed be breaking out the water cannons. Yes, free speech is alive and well in the Great White North, as you can tell by the ominous police presence that surrounds any hint of spontaneity or protest. But it’s not just here that speaking out about injustice can get you tossed in a jail cell. The Supreme Court of the United States just voted 6-3 to severely restrict First Amendment rights by declaring that verbal support for non-violent, lawful activity is equivalent to giving material aid to terrorists. Jimmy Carter better be careful the next time he monitors elections in Lebanon. Finally, I just looked up at the TV to see that Canada has placed additional sanctions on Iran, the pariah state that absorbs all the collective wrath of the wealthiest nations on earth on behalf of oil companies and the military-industrial complex. I’ve said what I wanted to say about the ongoing propaganda campaign to depict this weak nation - which has fully complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, unlike other countries which refused to even sign it - as some kind of sinister threat to world peace. Unfortunately, the Money Boyz control the flow of information and they are fixated on regime change in Iran. Which, of course, has nothing to do with oil.


It’s bad enough to read all this bad news. But what’s far, far worse is watching the media trot out, day after day, the same people who are responsible for these disasters and injustices, who profit from them, who keep them going, to defend the actions of the elite, block any positive changes, and shower blame on the victims of their criminal policies. Of course, it’s hard to beat the American media elite for sheer tone deafness. Jabba the Hutt lashed out at the poor again on his radio show the other day, literally ridiculing children who go hungry and depend on school lunches to obtain sufficient nutrients. Fat man Rush, who likely hasn’t seen his toes since his last Vietnam deferment, suggested they could just look in the fridge for ding-dongs, and if not, there's always the dumpster. There is literally no difference, save a couple centuries, between his despicable "advice" and Marie Antoninette suggesting that the solution for starving French peasants is to “let them eat cake.”

Then there is the ever-more extreme backwaters of the American far right, which gets nuttier by the day to the corporate media’s delight. Sharron Angle brought out an old Republican standby – denigrating the poor and unemployed as “deadbeats” determined to stay on welfare. The meme was echoed by Fox News talking heads, who rubbed salt in the wounds of the 1.2 million Americans whose unemployment benefits just ran out by declaring that they spend most of the money on junk food, beer, cable TV and comic books anyway. Also, Tea Party favourite Dr. Rand Paul insisted that the unemployed are just afraid to get their hands dirty and need to start doing lousy jobs, but that didn’t stop him from defending high pay for medical practitioners. Doctors, he declared, “deserve to earn a comfortable living.” As Digby declared, isn’t it funny how those advocating “tough love” austerity policies are never in danger of being affected either way?

I despair for humanity. The only real solution for the problems that plague the world today, from foreign wars to ecological disaster to extreme inequality, is socialism, the democratic control of society’s resources and the means of production on behalf of the working class. But such a proposal is unthinkable to the corporate overlords that control our society and the information that reaches the masses. They actively fight it through their politicians and their media, but there’s only so much they can do to control an enraged population faced with long-term unemployment and governments they correctly feel do not represent them. More dangerous is when they take that legitimate rage and deploy it against powerless targets like unions, the poor and minorities, through the help of bought-and-paid for demagogues like Glenn Beck or whoever his Canadian equivalent will be on the just-announced Sun TV News Channel. And the scariest part is that it seems to work.

No matter how bad things get, the broad masses appear equally unable to imagine alternatives to the status quo, despite their much-hyped exasperation with it. Elections across the world have repeatedly returned to power the same bourgeois political parties, all with the same deranged, nonsensical neo-Hooverist prescriptions for the global economy: austerity, cutting spending, and reining in the deficit, because what matters is continued profits for banks, not the devastation which prolonged unemployment continues to wreak on working people. And yet the people just keep voting them back in. Britain elects Conservative David Cameron. Germany throws in its lot with Angela Merkel and the free market-worshipping Free Democratic Party. No matter how much bad press Stephen Harper gets, Canadians remain enslaved to the Conservative-Liberal big business duopoly while the NDP runs from any thoughts of socialism. American primary voters backed corporate whores like Blue Dog “Democrat” Blanche Lincoln (D-AK), the senator from Wal-Mart, simply because Obama endorsed her. They also rejected progressive voices like Marcy Winograd in California. It seems there’s only one direction for working-class politics in America to go – further and further right.

Part of the problem is that there is no strong, organized working class movement in any of these countries that can find representation in government. Traditional social-democratic parties are a joke, having been completely enslaved to neoliberal dogma years ago. All will embrace the austerity policies that make the working class pay for the banksters’ crimes (see: France’s Socialist Party, the British Labour Party). The decades-long demonization of Marxist ideas during the Cold War has ensured that the most powerful theoretical tool for understanding the current economic crisis goes ignored by the masses that would most benefit from that knowledge.


The Canadian citizen who wishes to take a Marxist approach to the political struggle has a range of choices, none of them all that appealing. The Communist Party of Canada is the second-oldest political party in the country after the Liberals, yet its historical associations with Stalinism have left it on the political fringe. The party membership has aged to the point where it cannot represent an active, youthful political movement. As good as the People’s Voice newspaper is, its writers retain a 1930s view of the working class and revel in archaic terminology. Whatever the party’s policies, its unwillingness to confront the legacy of Stalinism or adopt the internationalist approach of Leon Trotsky means it will remain glued to the Soviet past. To take a coldly realistic view of the situation, it is highly unlikely that any party with the word “Communist” in its name will be able to avoid the totalitarian connotations of historical Communist parties led by Stalin and Mao, with their gross crimes against humanity. That fact also condemns the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), which ran out of steam around the time it fixated on Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha as its anti-revisionist model.

The Socialist Equality Party (Canada), which I’ve written about before, seems to have by far the best platform of any leftist party. Its policies are Trotskyist in nature and internationalist in scope, which in my mind points the way forward for the proletariat: the unity of workers across borders against their exploiters in the parasitic corporate-financial class. Unfortunately, my early enthusiasm for the SEP has waned somewhat after discovering how little infrastructure the party has in Canada – in my experience, basically none. The SEP’s Canadian office does not even have a phone number or e-mail address, and there’s little realistic hope for a party with such a laughable lack of organization. Short of spreading the word through social media and registering the SEP as an official political party, it remains very much a movement in theory only.

That leaves the New Democratic Party. I was made aware via Facebook that there is in fact an NDP Socialist Caucus. I completely agree with the Caucus’ policies and their general direction, i.e. the only way the NDP can survive as a relevant party is by moving to the left. Canada already has a centre-left bourgeois party: the Liberals. The NDP need to reclaim the ideological high ground by drawing on their roots with Tommy Douglas and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which declared its intention to work until capitalism was eradicated. While the NDP leadership is considerably to the right of its rank and file, its existence as a major political party with representatives in Parliament gives it a clout that no other Canadian party to the left of the Liberals can boast. For now, with the SEP little more than a publishing organization, there seems to be little alternative to pushing for the adoption of socialist principles within the NDP. Ontario party leader Andrea Horwath has indicated her openness to this approach, suggesting an NDP where members need not “check their socialism at the door.”

The political element is an important part of the class struggle, but any real progress is years away and will not affect the underlying dynamic of Canadian politics today, nor the subservience of our politicians to the interests of transnational capital. For the moment, the only course of action is mass organization, demonstrating on the streets in defiance of our government’s corporatist polices. I call for this tactic regularly, but too often it remains purely abstract and theoretical, with no real-world lynchpin.

Well, the opportunity arrives this weekend as the G20 congregates in Toronto. The Harper government’s monstrous waste of $1 billion for security, not to mention the overall tone of media reports promoting new weapons the police seem keen to use, indicate that the state is fully prepared to use violence as a means of crushing dissent. That fact in itself is not surprising, but the media’s approach suggests they will pin any blame on protesters. The use of police provocateurs to justify a crackdown is not out of the question. The decisive factor is, will the citizenry allow itself to be intimidated? Or will it make its presence and concerns known to a nationwide, nay, worldwide audience? Will it refuse to submit to the bludgeoning force of the modern police state?

I’ll be in Toronto this weekend to answer in the affirmative. So should you. Make your voice heard!

Remembrance Day: War, Myth and Reality

91 years ago today, the First World War finally ended. The man-made hell in Europe marked the dawn of a new age of industrialized slaughter. Its dubious status as "the war to end all wars" became a bad joke almost immediately following the Armistice, contradicted most visibly by the even greater atrocities of the Second World War. Even today, historians disagree on the causes of World War I, a needless conflict that inalterably changed the course of human development in the 20th century and beyond. War is a contagion that feeds on the collective sense of anger and tragedy engendered by every previous conflict. But even today, the historical conditions that allowed, even encouraged, such collective madness, endure through the continued dominance of the capitalist mode of production.

The world of 1914 was in many ways as globalized as our own. It was the heyday of imperialism, and the European powers had carved up most of the world in an effort to lay claim to raw materials and captive markets that would help enrich the ruling classes of each respective country. Long before the assassination in Sarajevo, there was no room left for each of the powers to expand without encroaching on the territory of the others. In his 1915 pamphlet War and the International, Leon Trotsky explained that the move to total war was borne out of the inevitable contradictions between international capitalist markets and the outmoded, artificial boundaries imposed by the nation-state:

The present war is at bottom a revolt of the forces of production against the political form of nation and state. It means the collapse of the national state as an independent economic unit.

The nation must continue to exist as a cultural, ideological and psychological fact, but its economic foundation has been pulled from under its feet. All talk of the present bloody clash being the work of national defense is either hypocrisy or blindness. On the contrary, the real objective significance of the War is the breakdown of the present national economic centers, and the substitution of a world economy in its stead. But the way the governments propose to solve this problem of imperialism is not through the intelligent, organized cooperation of all of humanity’s producers, but through the exploitation of the world’s economic system by the capitalist class of the victorious country; which country is by this War to be transformed from a Great Power into a World Power.

The War proclaims the downfall of the national state. Yet at the same time it proclaims the downfall of the capitalist system of economy. By means of the national state, capitalism has revolutionized the whole economic system of the world. It has divided the whole earth among the oligarchies of the great powers, around which were grouped the satellites, the small nations, who lived off the rivalry between the great ones. The future development of world economy on the capitalistic basis means a ceaseless struggle for new and ever new fields of capitalist exploitation, which must be obtained from one and the same source, the earth. The economic rivalry under the banner of militarism is accompanied by robbery and destruction which violate the elementary principles of human economy. World production revolts not only against the confusion produced by national and state divisions but also against the capitalist economic organizations, which has now turned into barbarous disorganization and chaos.

The War of 1914 is the most colossal breakdown in history of an economic system destroyed by its inherent contradictions. …

Capitalism has created the material conditions of a new Socialist economic system. Imperialism has led the capitalist nations into historic chaos. The War of 1914 shows the way out of this chaos by violently urging the proletariat on to the path of Revolution.

The results of the First World War ultimately satisfied no one save the United States, which was the only Great Power left relatively unscathed by the calamity. The Treaty of Versailles paved the way for the Second World War, which was ultimately fought for the same reasons as the First; namely, rising powers (Germany and Japan) were dissatisfied with the restrictions placed on their access to international markets by existing geopolitical power arrangements. In 1914, Germany's chief rivals were France and Great Britain; by 1939, with France and Britain weakened by the strain of fighting the last war, it was the USA that ultimately represented the greatest challenge to German supremacy.

The fact that the world wars were fought out of conflicting economic and geopolitical interests between the Great Powers has been distorted and romanticized in the time since; as always, the winners write the history books. The propaganda message of the Allied powers in the First and Second World Wars - i.e. that this was a fight against militarism and dictatorship on behalf of freedom and democracy - has become ingrained as official historical truth, aided by the undeniable brutality of the Nazi and Japanese war machines amid atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking. But we should not permit historical romanticism to get in the way of analyzing the real concerns of the ruling classes in each belligerent nation. As Glenn Greenwald reminded us today in a story about the increasingly autocratic Iraqi administration of Nouri al-Maliki, governments do not fight wars to spread freedom, democracy and human rights. They do it for more basic economic interests - not for the country as a whole, mind you, but to ensure the elites continue to reap the benefits of captive markets around the globe.

Note this analysis by veteran British Trotskyist Barbara Slaughter, who lived through World War II as a young girl. She beautifully punctures the Churchillian myth proffered by the government of the time and since adopted by all Western governments, getting to the reality of the situation:

After the fall of France, Churchill and the government propaganda machine portrayed Britain as a brave little island fighting on behalf of the people of the world for the defence of democracy. And this was widely accepted. The country was mobilised into the war effort, and a whole generation of youth was conscripted into the armed forces believing they were in fighting for democracy against the evils of fascism.

But far from being just a “little island,” Britain was the most powerful colonial nation the world had ever seen. The British Empire made up one-fifth of the earth’s surface, including the Indian subcontinent as well as vast regions in Africa.

The colonial peoples were cruelly oppressed and exploited and the British bourgeoisie extracted vast raw materials and financial resources from every corner of the globe. It was this power which was challenged by the German war machine. In order to become a world power, the German bourgeoisie required access to the resources of the world. And the establishment of Germany as a world power was something which the British ruling class could not tolerate.

The only possible response of all the major capitalist powers to the economic crisis that was raging in the 1920s and 30s was trade war, leading to military conflict.

In 1938, Trotsky had warned of the imminence of war, which he described as “a catastrophe that threatened the whole culture of mankind.” And what was the essence of that conflict? It was an imperialist war waged by the capitalist great powers—“democratic” and fascist alike—for the division of the world and its resources in the interests of profit.

If the ruling classes' lust for dominance and access to global markets was the key impetus to two world wars, can we now say that this gruesome period in human history is well and truly over? Sadly, no. As long as the capitalist mode of production persists, the bourgeoisie of each Great Power will aim to establish its own predominance in the zero-sum game of global hegemony. Frank Capra's World War II-era American propaganda film Why We Fight pointed to the potential for Axis domination of the Eurasian land mass as the key factor in compelling the USA to join the war effort. Today, the leading ideologues of American imperialism - most notably former Carter advisor and current Obama advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book The Grand Chessboard - emphasize the continued importance of U.S. dominance over Eurasia and its ample natural resources. Is it any wonder that the seemingly pointless war in Afghanistan - with its key strategic location in central Asia - continues to command unswerving support among ruling classes in Canada, the United States and Europe?

As the United States continues its historical decline - aggravated by the inability of the American political-media establishment to see beyond its own imperialistic hubris (biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression? Expand the war into Pakistan!) - we see the potential for rival powers like China, India and Russia to step into the fray and advance the economic interests of their own elites. The key question is, as the United States is further weakened and these powers grow ever stronger, will we see a new global conflict? I used to think the possibility was remote, given the deeply entangled trade relationship between "frenemies" China and the United States. However, as America becomes ever weaker economically, might it exploit the one area in which it is still indisputably a world leader - i.e., military force?

As this article helpfully explains, that is precisely what the world's premier rogue state has been up to for the last 20 years. The United States has engaged in military action against Iraq, the Balkan states, Afghanistan, Iraq again, and is now seemingly determined to pursue a war against Iran. The military-industrial complex, the backbone of the American economy since the Cold War (and, for all intents and purposes, the Second World War), has truly spun out of control. I wouldn't be surprised if, like Germany in the 1930s (to use a tired comparison), the country's elites turn to renewed war as an economic stimulus. They seem to prefer that to any other option.

Remembrance Day should be a day in which we reflect on the colossal waste and pointless slaughter of war. Sometimes we do, but even today we feel the need to justify the killing through abstract ideals, proclaiming that Canadian soldiers in World War I died "fighting for democracy". Perhaps the individual soldiers did, but the politicians who sent them there most certainly did not. Warren Beatty, as American Communist John Reed in the film Reds, had a piece of dialogue that summed it up best. When asked about the causes of the First World War, the Reed character simply responds, "profits".

It's a considerably less romantic picture than the one we commonly associate with slain soldiers, but an absolutely essential perspective if we are to educate the people about the true causes of war and the need to end the subjugation of human life to corporate profiteering. Sanitized war memorials and regurgitation of contemporary propaganda only serve to remythologize the pointless slaughter.

War is Peace

My first reaction upon discovering that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize was stunned disbelief - until I remembered that this is the same award that went to war criminal Henry Kissinger in 1973. The notion that a sitting president of the current United States, the world's most aggressive rogue state, could be awarded a prize for promoting world peace is laughable. It's a slap in the face to the families of slaughtered civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Gaza, and I'm sure it will reassure the Iranians that Obama, who still pushes the notion that "all options are on the table" regarding the American right to bomb their country, is more than just a fresh coat of paint on an old imperialist aggressor.

Obama's win makes a mockery of the Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee awarded it to Obama "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." If pretty words are all that is required to win the world's most prestigious award for promoting peace, then any tin-pot dictator who proclaims himself to have peaceful intentions while engaging in a war of aggression is equally eligible. Paul Craig Roberts masterfully highlighted the difference between what the president says and what he actually does:

Obama, the committee gushed, has created “a new climate in international politics.”

Tell that to the 2 million displaced Pakistanis and the unknown numbers of dead ones that Obama has racked up in his few months in office. Tell that to the Afghans where civilian deaths continue to mount as Obama’s “war of necessity” drones on indeterminably.

No Bush policy has changed. Iraq is still occupied. The Guantanamo torture prison is still functioning. Rendition and assassinations are still occurring. Spying on Americans without warrants is still the order of the day. Civil liberties are continuing to be violated in the name of Oceania’s “war on terror.”

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The non-cynical can say that the Nobel committee is seizing on Obama’s rhetoric to lock him into the pursuit of peace instead of war. We can all hope that it works. But the more likely result is that the award has made “War is Peace” the reality.

Obama has done nothing to hold the criminal Bush regime to account, and the Obama administration has bribed and threatened the Palestinian Authority to go along with the US/Israeli plan to deep-six the UN’s Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes committed during Israel’s inhuman military attack on the defenseless civilian population in the Gaza Ghetto.

The US Ministry of Truth is delivering the Obama administration’s propaganda that Iran only notified the IAEA of its “secret” new nuclear facility because Iran discovered that US intelligence had discovered the “secret” facility. This propaganda is designed to undercut the fact of Iran’s compliance with the Safeguards Agreement and to continue the momentum for a military attack on Iran.

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“War is Peace” is now the position of the formerly antiwar organization, Code Pink. Code Pink has decided that women’s rights are worth a war in Afghanistan.

When justifications for war become almost endless--oil, hegemony, women’s rights, democracy, revenge for 9/11, denying bases to al Qaeda and protecting against terrorists--war becomes the path to peace.

The Nobel committee has bestowed the prestige of its Peace Prize on Newspeak and Doublethink.

Glenn Greenwald takes a slightly more ambivalent view, pointing out that Obama inherited much of these problems and, in any event, presides over a war-making state that accounts for 70% of worldwide arms sales. It's difficult to get past that kind of institutional inertia, and Obama should be commended for his efforts to adopt a more multilateral approach to foreign policy. But true efforts for peace require more than mere words, and thus far that's pretty much all Obama has had to offer.

Nothing of substance has changed in U.S. foreign policy. We have seen a cosmetic change in the country's approach to dealing with Iran, one that has already produced more dividends in one day than eight years of neoconservative threats. But the overall American tone remains one of aggressive bullying, where Obama embraces the Washington consensus of a supposed Iranian "threat" that has little basis in reality. It's an open question at this moment whether the U.S. or Israel will engage in military strikes on Iran; I'm guessing not, since any such action will cause the Middle East to explode and widen the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq into a horrific regional conflagration, but I could be wrong. Hopefully not.

It's true that Obama has only been in office for nine months and can't be expected to solve all of the myriad problems bequeathed to him by the criminal Bush administration. But the bottom line is that little has changed. Once you get past the rhetorical flourishes in his speeches, where Obama has demonstrated a consistent knack for saying one thing while doing the exact opposite, it's clear that he will prove no impediment whatsoever to Wall Street and the Pentagon devouring what's left of the American economy, nor to the continued waging of perpetual war. Again, credit must go to Greenwald for cutting to the heart of the matter:

That was from a May airstrike in which over 100 Afghan civilians were killed by American jets -- one of many similar incidents this year, including one only a week ago that killed 9 Afghan civilians. How can someone responsible for that, and who has only escalated that war, possibly be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the very same year that he did that? Does that picture above look like the work of a Nobel Peace laureate?

Let me be clear: any man who escalates one war, refuses to end another, orders drone attacks on a supposedly allied country, constantly threatens war with yet another nation, and says absolutely nothing while his country's proxy commits war crimes against defenseless civilians in a virtual open-air prison, slaughtering hundreds of children and unleashing white phosphorus on the population, is not a man of peace. He is a warmonger, plain and simple, once you get past the slick gauze of corporate PR. To see such an individual awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is an insult to peace-loving peoples everywhere, and merely confirms the enduring wisdom of George Orwell.

Last To Die

Another day, another Canadian casualty in Afghanistan. My best friend just joined the army a month ago, and it's hard to see one more guy our age get blown to hell on the other side of the world for no discernible purpose. Afghanistan is a war even its staunchest supporters find increasingly difficult to justify, and it seems young Private Couterier thought the same thing:

Family members of the latest Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan told a Quebec City newspaper that the young soldier considered the mission "a bit useless."

Nicolas Couturier, brother of Pte. Jonathan Couturier, told Le Soleil that the 23-year-old soldier had mixed emotions about being in Afghanistan.

"That war, he thought it was a bit useless, that they were wasting their time there," he was quoted telling Le Soleil.

"He didn't talk about it," Nicolas told the newspaper. "He was positive, but at certain moments, let's just say he was fed up."

Jonathan Couturier died Thursday morning when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb while returning from a mission in the Panjwaii district, southwest of Kandahar city.

The soldier's sister-in-law and his brother's spouse, Valerie Boucher, also told the newspaper Jonathan "didn't want to go" and was very much looking forward to coming home.

Nicolas Couturier was also critical of the Afghanistan mission, saying it "is not serving anything."

Bottom line, the main reason Canada is in Afghanistan is because the United States went there and dragged NATO along. The main reason the United States is there, despite the chest-beating rhetoric about "defeating Al-Qaeda", is to gain control of an energy-rich, strategically important area in central Asia. It's now public record that the United States government planned a war in Afghanistan long before 9/11 provided a convenient justification. But the war is about more than just geopolitical strategy or access to energy reserves. In many ways, Afghanistan is about war for war's sake.

In his book The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism, Ismael Hossein-zadeh analyzed the role of the military-industrial complex in American foreign policy, and one of the more interesting conclusions he drew was that the sheer magnitude of American military might makes war a more attractive policy option. As suggested by John Kerry in 2004, the 9/11 attacks were more of a law-enforcement issue than a military affair, and should have demanded a concerted multinational effort to increase intelligence and security through traditional law-enforcement means. The decision to invade Afghanistan was based on political decisions by trigger-happy Republicans and neoconservatives - who see anything less than the use of force as "appeasement" - combined with the sheer institutional inertia of the permanent war economy. Conservatives always decry government spending - except regarding the armed forces, which they happily shower with taxpayer dollars via an extreme military Kenysianism. It's an ideological contradiction that they never get called out on, and it creates a downward spiral of increasing war, death and destruction. If the Great Depression can be said to have been "solved" by World War II, then aside from their energy resources and geostrategic significance, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are little more than giant public works projects for the military.

Ever since Lester B. Pearson, Canadians have prided themselves on their role as "peacekeepers". But the war in Afghanistan is just that - a full-out war, one that has now dragged on well past our level of involvement in either World War, yet which does not clearly advance our national security in any way. If the fear is of Afghanistan providing a "safe haven" for terrorists, I fail to see how keeping hundreds of thousands of Western troops there will do anything but increase Afghans' hatred for us. Afghanistan and Iraq prove that Western military intervention in the Middle East has been a public-relations boon to Al-Qaeda. Every NATO airstrike on a wedding party can be presented as further evidence that the West is out to destroy Islam. If we want to prevent future terrorist attacks, the only way to do it is through more subtle but effective methods, like improving border security, intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement (the civil liberties repercussions of which is a whole other issue). Maintaining thousands of troops in a distant land - sacrificing our own nationals as well as countless Afghan civilians in an effort to prop up a corrupt government little better than the Taliban - is not the way to do it.

Our country has expended enough blood and treasure in this quixotic quest to bring "peace, order and good government" to Afghanistan, justifiably referred to as the graveyard of empires, less a nation-state than a loose collection of warlords' domains. When even an establishment water-carrier like George Will suggests it's time to pull out, the writing is pretty much on the wall.